In the continuing battle to give males in college roughly the same due process rights as possessed by a black man in 1930's Alabama, my alma mater was one of the last holdouts fighting the trend. No longer:

Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Education wrapped up its investigation of Princeton University's sexual harassment and assault policies. The findings were unsurprising, though still striking: the government essentially accused the university of violating federal anti-discrimination law by extending too much due process to accused students.

Princeton had been one of the last hold-outs on the standard of proof in college rape trials. The university required adjudicators to obtain "clear and convincing" proof that a student was guilty of sexual assault before convicting him. That's too tough, said DOE. As part of its settlement, Princeton is required to lower its evidence standard to "a preponderance of the evidence," which means adjudicators must convict if they are 50.1 percent persuaded by the accuser.

Princeton's old policy was also criticized by DOE for allowing accused students to appeal decisions, but not accusers. Both this practice and the evidence standard were revised under Princeton's new, DOE-compliant policy.

Note that Princeton's former policies on burden of proof and restrictions on double jeopardy roughly mirror the due process rights Americans have in every other context except when they are males accused of sexual assault on a college campus.

I wish Princeton had held out and forced the Administration to test this in court. I certainly would have donated to support the legal fund.

Grade inflation is back in the news, as the Harvard Crimson reports that the median grade at Harvard is an A-. This is clearly absurd. It reminds me of some of the old Olympics judging where they had a 10 point scale but everyone scored between 9.7 and 9.9. The problem is not necessarily that the mean is skewed, but that there is almost no room left to discriminate between high and low performance.

There is one potential way to combat this, and it was invented by colleges themselves. Consider grading in high school. My kids go to a very tough-grading private school where A's are actually hard to get. The school sends (for Arizona) a fairly high percentage of its students to Ivy and Ivy-level schools, but the school produces someone with a perfect 4.0 only once every four or five years. Compare that to our local public school, that seems to produce dozens of perfect 4.0's every year -- in fact since it adds a point for honors classes, it produces a bunch of 5.0's.

Colleges understand that a 3.7 from Tough-grading High may be better than a 5.0 from We-have-a-great-football-team High. They solve this by demanding that when high schools provide them with a transcript, it also provide them with data on things like the distribution of grades.

Employers should demand something similar from colleges. This is a little harder for employers, since colleges seem to be allowed to legally collude on such issues while employers can get sued over it. But it seems perfectly reasonable that an employer should demand, say, not only the student's grade for each class but also the median and 90th percentile grades given in that same class. This will allow an employer to see how the school performed relative to the rest of the class, which is really what the employer cares about. And schools that have too many situations where the student got an A, the median was an A, and the 90th percentile was an A may get punished over time with less interest from the hiring community.

One way to get this going is for an influential institution to start printing transcripts this way. The right place to start would be a great institution that feels it has held the line more on grade inflation. My alma mater Princeton claims to be in this camp, and I would love to see them take leadership on this (the campus joke at Princeton during the Hepatitis C outbreak there was that at Harvard it would have been Hepatitis A).

Postcript - An alternate grading system from Harvard Business School: When I was at HBS, they did not give A's and B's. We had three grades called category I, II, and III. By rule, the professor gave the top 15% of the class category I, the bottom 10% category III, and everyone else got a category II. I actually thought this was a hell of a system. It discriminated at the top, and provided just enough fear of failure to keep people from slacking.

One of the great joys of being in Princeton's class of 1984 is having master cartoonist (and libertarian, though I don't know what he would call himself) Henry Payne in our class. For the last 30 years, Henry has made a custom birthday card for the class, which are mailed to each of us on the appropriate day. This is mine from 2014

I started saving these a while back but I wish I had saved all 30. I also have a caricature of me drawn in college by Henry, but it does not get a prized place on our wall at home because it includes my college girlfriend as well, which substantially reduces its value as perceived by my wife. (In speaker-building there is a common term of art called "wife acceptance factor" or WAF. Pictures of ex-girlfriends have low WAF).

In a free society, this is a no-brainer. The Northwestern players are welcome to create an association among themselves and call it anything they like, including "union". That association is free to try to negotiate with the university for better terms (they are also free to fail at this and make no progress).

However, it is clear that we are not a free society because the players had to go to the government and ask permission to form this particular type of association. The reason is that associations called "unions" have been granted special powers and privileges under the law not available to other associations. There are also a large body of very particular rules for how such associations may conduct business and how other groups (in this case the University) can or cannot interact with it. It is a very tricky legal and philosophical question whether this package of benefits and privileges should be accorded to a group of college football players

In a free society, the fact that the players don't get paid cash and that their universities make millions off the football program would be irrelevant. The players freely agreed to the deal (in most cases, playing in exchange for free tuition and perhaps a chance to land an NFL job) so there is nothing inherently unfair about it.

However, in our society, we have all sorts of government interventions. I consider many of these interventions to be counter-productive, even occasionally insane. But if one is to navigate such a society (rather than, say, go off and live in Galt's Gulch), I think the principle of equal protection is critical. Arbitrary government interventions in free exchange are FAR worse when applied unevenly. From an equal protection standpoint, I think the players may have a good case.

The law generally does not allow profit-making businesses (and the NCAA and college footfall are certainly those) to accept unpaid labor. Many folks who don't deal with the Fair Labor Standards Act every day will say: "players are paid, they get free tuition." But this is not how the FLSA works. It counts non-cash wages only in very specific circumstances that are enumerated in the law (e.g. lodging). Think of it this way -- McDonald's could not legally just pay all its employees in french fries and claim to be compliant with the law. Also, large numbers of Division 1 football and basketball players never graduate, which shows a fair amount of contempt by players for this supposedly valuable "free tuition" compensation.

On the other hand, most college athletics are not profit-making. My son plays baseball at Amherst College -- it would be laughable to call this a profit center. I am not sure there are but a handful of women's teams in any sport that generate profits for their school, and even on the men's side money-making is limited to a few score men's football and basketball teams. But the few that do make money make a LOT. University of Texas has its own TV network, as do most major conferences.

The law generally does not allow any group of enterprises to enter into agreements that restrict employment options. Google et. al. are getting flamed right now, and likely face criminal anti-trust charges and lawsuits, for agreements to restrict hiring employees from each other's firms. The NCAA cuts such deals all the time, both severely restricting moves between schools (transfer provisions in Division I are quite onerous) and preventing poaching at least of younger players by professional leagues like the NBA and NFL. The notion that top players in the NCAA are playing for their education is a joke -- they are playing in college because that is what they have to do in order to eventually be allowed in a league where they can get paid for their skills.

Actually trying to pay players would be a real mess. In a free society, one might just pay the ones who play the most profitable sports and contribute the most value. But with Title IX, for example, that is impossible. Paying only the most financially valuable players and teams would lead to 99% of the pay going to men, which would lead to Title IX gender discrimination suits before the first paycheck was even delivered. And 99% of college athletes probably don't even want to be paid

Part of the pay problem is that the NCAA is so moronic in its rules. Even if the university does not pay players, many outsider would if allowed. Boosters love to pay football and basketball players under the table in cash and cars and such, and top athletes could easily get endorsement money or paid for autographs by third parties. But NCAA rules are so strict that athletes can be in violation of the rules for accepting a free plane ticket from a friend to go to his mother's funeral. When I interview students for Princeton admissions, I never buy them even a coffee in case they are a recruited athlete, because doing so would violate the rules.

Much of this is based on an outdated fetish for amateurism, that somehow money taints athletic achievement. It is hilarious to see good progressive college presidents spout this kind of thing, because in fact this notion of amateurism was actually an aristocratic invention to keep the commoners out of sports (since commoners would not have the means to dedicate much of their life to training without a source of income). The amateur ideal is actually an exclusionist aristocratic tool that has for some reason now been adopted as a progressive ideal. Note that nowhere else in college do we require that students not earn money with their skills -- business majors can make money in business over the summer, artists can sell their art, musicians can be paid to perform. When Brooke Shields was at Princeton, she appeared in the school amateur play despite making millions simultaneously as a professional actress. Only athletes can't trade their skill for money in their free time.

I am not sure where this is all going, but as a minimum I think the NCAA is going to be forced to allow athletes to earn outside income and accept outside benefits without losing their eligibility.

First, Alex Tabarrok says that most of the research out there is that test prep explains at most 20% of the variation by income, and probably less. This fits my experience with test prep. I have always felt that 90% of the advantage of test prep was just taking a few practice tests so when the actual test days come, the kids are comfortable they understand how each section of the test works and are not thrown by the types of problems they will face. My feeling is that most of what you can learn in fancy test prep courses is in those books they sell for about $40. We sent our kids to a course that cost a lot more than $40, but frankly I did not do it because I thought they would get any special knowledge they could not get in the book, but because I was outsourcing the effort to get them to do the work. Seriously, I think a parent with $40 and the willingness to make sure their kids actually goes through the book would get most of the benefit.

Which raises the question of whether test prep is correlated to income because of its cost, or whether it is correlated to income because high income folks are more likely to place value on their kids testing well and make them do the prep work. We will come back to this in a minute.

So if its not test prep, what does drive the difference? I don't know, because I have not studied the problem. But I can speak for our family. My kids do well on SAT-type tests because they go to a tough rigorous private school. Let's take one example. When my daughter was a sophomore in high school, she scored a perfect 80 (equivalent of the SAT 800) on the writing and grammar section of the PSAT. Now, my daughter is smart but no Ivy-bound savant. She took no prep course. My daughter aced the PSAT grammar because her freshman teacher drove those kids hard on grammar. I am talking about a pace and workload and set of expectations that kids in our junior high school start talking about and dreading two years before they even get to the class, and this at a school already known for a tough work load.

This teacher is legendarily fabulous, so obviously that is hard to replicate everywhere. But she is fabulous because my kids actually came away excited about Homer and other classics. This is what I pay private-school money for. But what she did in grammar, what got my daughter her perfect score, could be emulated by about any competent teacher...theoretically. But in fact it can't happen because such an approach could never survive in a public school. The work expectations are way too high -- parents and students would revolt. It only works for those who self-select.

Well, it only works today for those who self-select and can afford a private school. Unfortunately, we have an education system where everyone is forced to pay tuition to what is at-best a teach-to-the-mean school. If one wants more, they have to be wealthy enough to pay tuition to a second school. Which is why school choice makes so much sense. Why should only the wealthy have the ability to self-select into more intensive programs? BUt this is a conclusion most the education establishment is desperate for people not to reach. Thus, the hand-waving over test prep.

Of course, there are a million other wealth, genetic, and parental effects that come into this equation. For example, my kids read for fun, probably in large part because my wife and I read for fun. How many kids read 10+ books outside of school each year? They do this not because my kids are awesomer than other kids, but simply because that was the expectation they grew up with, that we spend free time reading books. Other families might spend their free time, say, doing home improvement projects such that their kids all grow up great woodworkers. I am not sure one set of activities is superior to another, but my kids end up testing well. Of course, I am not sure they can use a screwdriver. Seriously, over Christmas break I asked my 20-year-old son to pass me the Phillips head screwdriver and he had no idea which one that was.

I was thinking about the question above of how one separates out parental expectations from all the other effects (like parental DNA and income and quality of schools, etc.) I interview high schoolers for Princeton admissions, so I have come to learn that some public high schools have advanced programs, to allow kids some self-selection into a more rigorous program within the context of public schools (this is usually either an AP program, an honors program, or an IB program). By the way, the existence of these programs at public schools correlates pretty highly with the average income of that school's district.

Here would be an interesting study: Take high schools with some sort of honors program option. We want to look at the income demographics of the kids who chose the honors program vs. those who choose the standard program. We would therefore want to look only at high schools that take all comers into the honors program -- if they have some sort of admissions requirement, then this would screw up our study because we want to test solely for how demographics affect the choice to pursue a more rigorous, college-oriented program. I would love to see the results, but my hypothesis is that test-prep is a proxy for the same thing -- less about income per se and more about parental expectations.

I am simply exhausted with Paul Krugman calling people anti-science neanderthals for staking out fairly mainstream economic positions that he himself has held in the past. It would be one thing to say, "well, I used to believe the same thing but I changed my mind because x, y, z". That would be a statement to respect. Instead Krugman 1) pretends he never said any such thing and 2) acts like his opponent's position is so out of the mainstream that they are some sort of terrorist for even suggesting it.

Yesterday, New York Times columnist and CUNY economics professor Paul Krugman had some very strong words about the position in Republican Congressman Paul Ryan’s new poverty report that American welfare programs discourage work and “actually reduce opportunity, creating a poverty trap.” In fact, after contrasting the Ryan report’s view on poverty traps with some data on inequality and welfare states, Krugman resoundingly concluded that Ryan’s ideas were a total sham:

So the whole poverty trap line is a falsehood wrapped in a fallacy; the alleged facts about incentive effects are mostly wrong, and in any case the entire premise that work effort = social mobility is wrong.

Despite Krugman’s strong conclusions, however, Ryan’s views about US welfare policies and poverty traps are actually pretty mainstream – cited by people across the political spectrum as a big reason to reform state federal poverty programs. In fact, a New York Times columnist and Princeton economics professor expressed these widely-held views on the Old Grey Lady’s pages a mere two months ago:

But our patchwork, uncoordinated system of antipoverty programs does have the effect of penalizing efforts by lower-income households to improve their position: the more they earn, the fewer benefits they can collect. In effect, these households face very high marginal tax rates. A large fraction, in some cases 80 cents or more, of each additional dollar they earn is clawed back by the government.”

Even more, the Ryan report’s “poverty trap” analysis is based on the work of the Urban Institute’s Gene Steuerle’s (see p. 7 of the Ryan report), on whom the very same Princeton professor once wrote:

[I]t’s actually a well-documented fact that effective marginal rates are highest, not on the superrich, but on workers toward the lower end of the scale. Why? Partly because of the payroll tax, but largely because of means-tested benefits that fade out as your income rises. Here’s a recent discussion by Eugene Steuerle…

That professor, if you haven’t already guessed, was none other than Paul Krugman.

By the way, can I say how happy the first sentance of this quote makes me, to no longer see my alma mater mentioned in the same breath as Krguman at every turn?

So I guess the Left has hit on its favored meme in response to the millions of insurance cancellations. From Obama to Valerie Jarrett to any number of bloggers, the explanation is that the cancelled policies were "sub-standard". We may have thought we liked them, but it turns out we were wrong. Deluded in fact.

These folks -- despite not knowing my income, my net worth, my health situation, my age, my family size, my number and age of kids, my risk adversity, my degree of hypochondria, my preventative care habits, my diet, my lifestyle, my personal preferences and priorities, or any details about my insurance policy that I spend many hours analyzing and cross-comparing -- have decided they know better than I what health insurance I should want.

My plan was not substandard. I graduated magna cum laude in engineering from Princeton and was first in my class at Harvard Business School. I spent hours shopping for my coverage and was fully satisfied with my resulting policy. Many of the aspects of my policy that cause Obama to call it "sub-standard" -- lack of mental health care, lack of pediatric dental care, lack of maternity care, lack of free contraception, a higher than average deductible -- were my preferences. I got what I wanted.

More expensive, more highly featured products are not necessarily "better". A Mercedes is not necessarily the best car choice for a middle class buyer just because it has more features than his Taurus. Would Obama tell that person his Taurus is "sub-standard" and force him to pay for a Mercedes? If not, why the hell is doing the exact same thing but with health insurance OK?

When Obama came to that section of his speech when the line usually falls, he went with a new spin. If you’ve lost your healthcare thanks to his law, he wants you to know that you were just “under-insured.” Because he says so.

“One of the things health reform was designed to do was to help not only the uninsured but also the under-insured,” he said.

“If you had one of these substandard plans before the Affordable Care Act became law, and our really liked that plan, you are able to keep it. That’s what I said when I was running for office.”

“But ever since the law was passed, if insurers decided to cancel or downgrade these substandard plans, what we said, under the law, is you have got to replace them with quality, comprehensive coverage,” he said, “because, that, too, was a central premise of the Affordable Care Act from the very beginning.”

Update: ugh

Update #2: Yesterday I said the time seemed right for the Left to pick a meme to explain the insurance cancellations and then give the media its marching orders. David Firestone of the NYT has gotten the memo

The so-called cancellation letters waved around at yesterday’s hearing were simply notices that policies would have to be upgraded or changed. Some of those old policies were so full of holes that they didn’t include hospitalization, or maternity care, or coverage of other serious conditions.

Republicans were apparently furious that government would dare intrude on an insurance company’s freedom to offer a terrible product to desperate people.

“Some people like to drive a Ford, not a Ferrari,” said Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. “And some people like to drink out of a red Solo cup, not a crystal stem. You’re taking away their choice.”

Luckily, a comprehensive and affordable insurance policy is no longer a Ferrari; it is now a basic right. In the face of absurd comments and analogies like this one, Ms. Sebelius never lost her cool in three-and-a-half hours of testimony, perhaps because she knows that once the computer problems and the bellowing die down, the country will be far better off.

So you see the talking points as the media gets their orders. 1. All policies that were cancelled were sub-standard. 2. People will be better off with more expensive policies, even if they are too dumb to konw it.

My policy was perfectly fine. I was not tricked. I am willing to bet I am at least as smart as David Firestone. I am positive I am smarter than Barrack Obama. And yet my policy was cancelled.

In a hard-hitting, incredibly researched piece of journalism entitled "Me & Ted", Josh Marshall polled his progressive friends at Princeton and found that they all thought Ted Cruz was an asshole.

Well, it turns out Ted and I went to college together. And not just we happened to be at the same place at the same time. We were both at a pretty small part of a relatively small university. We both went to Princeton. I was one year ahead of him. But we were both in the same residential college, which basically meant a small cluster of dorms of freshmen and sophomores numbering four or five hundred students who all ate in the same dining hall.

As it turned out, though, almost everyone I knew well in college remembered him really well. Vividly. And I knew a number of his friends. But for whatever reason I just didn't remember him. When I saw college pictures of him, I thought okay, yeah, I remember that guy but sort of in the way where you're not 100% sure you're not manufacturing the recollection.

I was curious. Was this just my wife who tends to be a get-along and go-along kind of person? So I started getting in touch with a lot of old friends and asking whether they remembered Ted. It was an experience really unlike I've ever had. Everybody I talked to - men and women, cool kids and nerds, conservative and liberal - started the conversation pretty much the same.

"Ted? Oh yeah, immense a*#hole." Sometimes "total raging a#%hole." Sometimes other variations on the theme. But you get the idea. Very common reaction.

Wow, so this is what famous journalists do? Hey, I can do the same thing.

I went to Princeton with Eliot Spitzer. He was a couple of years ahead of me but had a really high profile on campus, in part due to his running for various University Student Government offices. So I checked with many of my friends back in college, and you know what? They all thought Spitzer was an asshole. I was reminded that we all disliked him so much that when one person (full disclosure, it was me) drunkenly asked who wanted to go moon Spitzer and the governing council meeting next door, we got 30 volunteers. He was so irritating that he actually inspired a successful opposition party cum performance art troupe called the Antarctic Liberation Front (Virginia Postrel also wrote about it here).

Wow, am I a big time journalist now? Will GQ be calling for me to do an article on Spitzer?

Look, this is going to be true for lots of politicians, because they share a number of qualities. They tend to have huge egos, which eventually manifest as a desire to tell us what to do because they know better than we do. They are willful, meaning they can work obsessively to get their own way even over trivial stuff. And they are charismatic, meaning they generally have a group of people who adore them and whose sycophancy pisses everyone else off. In other words, they are all assholes.

Today, President Obama sort-of kind-of acknowledged a problem with Federal college student lending: Federal loans are doing nothing to improve the affordability of colleges, as colleges are just raising tuition in lockstep with increased lending, thus leaving students massively in debt for the same old degree.

His proposed solution is to somehow tie the availability of Federal funds to some type of government scoring system for colleges. The probability that this will do anything to reign in student debt is exactly zero. But it will potentially give the Feds another vehicle for control (similar to what Title IX has given them) of even the most mundane university policies. Why not, for example, give high scores to universities with the restrictive and politically correct speech codes this Administration favors, thus effectively denying money to students of universities that don't have Eric Holder-sanctioned speech policies?

If you think I am exaggerating, look at the recent Washington Monthly college rankings as a prototype for the Obama scoring system. In their system, colleges are ranked higher if they have a higher percentage of Peace Corps*** graduates, if more of their Federal work-study grant money is used for jobs at non-profits rather than for-profits**, and if their school reports more community service hours. This latter points to another issue -- a number of schools rank really low on community service hours, effectively all tied with zero. This is obviously a reporting issue. The Obama plan just about guarantees that universities will start to game all these metrics -- does no one pay attention to the fraud that has been found in the law school rankings?

It chose to tap its sizable $1.6 billion endowment to provide tuition discounts so generous that the annual net cost to students with family incomes below $75,000 is only $843, less than a third of the sticker price of a year at the average community college. Another elite liberal arts college, Williams, also makes our list. But instructively, none of the other prestigious, well-endowed private colleges and universities in America—not Harvard or Yale, Swarthmore or Smith, none of them—can make that claim.

Actually, we don't know if that last sentence is true because the authors left Harvard and Yale off the list entirely. My impression is that Princeton makes is very inexpensive for families making less than $75,000 as well, so I could not understand the claim -- perhaps even without debt the tuition charges to low-income families are still unreasonably high. But we will never know, because apparently Princeton is not even on the list -- not because it does not direct a lot of its endowment to need-based scholarships, but because it has only 10% students on Pell grants, and the authors decided that you could not be on the list unless that number was at least 20% "to make sure they aren’t just catering to the affluent." This just points to how quickly such a system gets politicized. What does "catering to the affluent" have anything to do with bang for the buck? If they really trust their methodology, they would have included these schools and if they are really just over-priced rich kids' playgrounds, that should have come through in the ranking. Instead, the author's have explicitly invented an unrelated criteria to weed Ivy League schools out, a criteria more related to admissions requirements than to financial aid requirements and affordability and value (the ostensible bases for the rankings).

By the way, if you want to get a really good laugh, this is supposed to be a value or "bang for the buck" ranking, but they only rank the costs. There is absolutely no ranking of "bang". Bizarre. It is as if any degree of any type from any institution is equally valuable. Which, by the way, is part of the problem in the student loan bubble -- just this assumption.

** This is EXACTLY the kind of incentive that will help pay off those future college loans -- lets make sure to encourage every student to work in non-profits rather than for-profits jobs.

*** Why the Peace Corps? Why not a myriad of other useful and productive occupations? If you want to have a service metric, why is Peace Corps there and, say, Teach for America not?

Apparently it is somewhat unethical in the feminist world for women to go to the Ivy League and then become a full-time mom. I know several women who have Ivy League undergrad or graduate degrees and have, for at least part of their lives, been full time moms. I am married to one, for example. I have a few thoughts on this:

People change plans. Life is path-dependent. Many women who ended up being full time moms out of the Ivy League will tell you that it still surprises them they made that choice.

Why is education suddenly only about work? I thought liberal arts education was all about making you a better person, for pursuits that go far beyond just one's work life. I, for example, get far more use of my Princeton education in my hobbies (e.g. blogging) than in my job. The author uses law school as an example, and I suppose since law school is just a highbrow trade school one might argue it is an exception. But what is wrong with salting the "civilian" population with non-lawyers who are expert on the law?

Type A Ivy League-trained full-time moms do a lot more that just be a mom, making numerous contributions in their community. I am always amazed what a stereotyped view of moms that feminists have.

If spots in the Ivy League, as implied by this article, should only be held by people seriously wanting to use the degree for a meaningful lifetime career, then maybe the Ivy League needs to rethink what degrees it offers. Ask both of my sisters about the value of their Princeton comparative literature degrees in the marketplace. By this logic, should Princeton be giving valuable spots to poetry majors?

I can say from experience that the one thing a liberal arts education, particularly at Princeton which emphasized being well rounded, prepared me for was being a parent. I can help my kids develop and pursue interests in all different directions. One's love of learning and comfort (rather than distrust) of all these intellectual rubs off on kids almost by osmosis. In other words, what is wrong with applying an Ivy League education to raising fabulous and creative kids?

The author steps back from the brink, but this comes perilously close to the feminist tendency to replace one set of confining expectations for women with a different set.

Oh and by the way, to the author's conclusion:

Perhaps instead of bickering over whether or not colleges and universities should ask us to check boxes declaring our racial identity, the next frontier of the admissions should revolve around asking people to declare what they actually plan to do with their degrees. There's nothing wrong with someone saying that her dream is to become a full-time mother by 30. That is an admirable goal. What is not admirable is for her to take a slot at Yale Law School that could have gone to a young woman whose dream is to be in the Senate by age 40 and in the White House by age 50.

I would argue the opposite -- the fewer people of both sexes who go to law school to be in the Senate by 40 and the White House by 50, the better.

Update: My wife added two other thoughts

Decades ago, when her mom was considering whether she wanted to go to graduate school, her dad told her mom that even if she wanted to be a stay at home mom, a good graduate degree was the best life insurance she could have in case he died young.

Women with good degrees with good earning potential have far more power in any divorce. How many women do you know who are trapped in a bad marriage because they don't feel like they have the skills to thrive in the workplace alone?

One of the charities my family supports is Teach for America. Among other things, we sponsor a local teacher in the program. A bunch of our friends were kind enough to chip in with gifts for the kids in her class and my wife and I delivered them last week at the Phoenix Collegiate Academy, a charter school in South Phoenix for 5-8 graders.

The fun of delivering the presents was reduced later on finding out that at almost that same moment, another group of kids was being killed in Connecticut. But through a strange series of articles that seemed to have used the Sandy Hook massacre as an argument for teacher unionization and against charter schools (yeah, I don't get the connection either), I found out that teachers unions hate Teach for America. Which means that I will likely double my contribution next year.

Postscript: Teach for America began as a senior thesis at Princeton. Its key idea is to make teaching a viable job option, as least for a few years, for top college grads. The program is quite selective, and combines talented highly motivated young people with a proven teaching approach. They then drop these teachers into the public school system, often in classrooms with a high percentage of kids who qualify for school lunch programs (ie low income).

It's clear from the article that teachers union and education establishment types hate these teachers. Since they make a contrast by calling themselves "professionals", the presumed implication is that these young people are unprofessional. Its amazing to me that anyone who has spent even ten minutes in a room with a group of TFA teachers could be so hostile to them. I have met many of them, and they are a consistently amazing bunch who are both smart and genuinely love their kids.

I was skeptical, and still am a bit, of the notion of throwing great teachers into a failing public school system. They clearly help individual kids, which is why I am still behind it, but they do nothing to help the overall system. It's like sending great engineers into Solyndra -- at some level, it seems like a waste (though I am impressed with this particular charter school, which seems to be doing a good job with the limited resources it has -- it gets far less money per pupil than the average public school in Phoenix but does a better job given the demographic of its students).

Back in August, when I wrote the first section of this guide, I was sitting in Long Island at a baseball recruiting camp. Now that my son has completed the process, I want to share the rest of our experience for others who, like myself, have an athletic kid but no idea how the college sports recruiting process works.

Some reminders. First, this is baseball-specific -- other sports work differently, I presume. Second, this is the experience of a kid with good baseball skills but not good enough to have been scouted by a Division I baseball power like Texas or Arizona State. Third, my son was not looking for scholarship money. He was looking to play baseball in college, and to parlay his baseball talent into admission in a top academic school. We were looking at division III (DIII from now on) schools like Williams, Amherst, Haverford, Pomona and a few DI Ivies. Finally, our experience is heavily colored by the fact that he plays for one of the smallest high schools in the state, so getting attention and recruiting advice was much harder than if he had played for a baseball powerhouse.

Here were some of the lessons from our first episode:

The DIII baseball recruiting process does not really even begin until the summer between Junior and Senior year. My son landed a good spot without a single coach even knowing he existed as of June 1 before his Senior year of high school. As late as January of his senior year he was still getting emails from coaches asking him if he might be interested in their school.

In baseball, coaches mostly ignore high school stats and records unless it is a school with which they are very familiar. They use their eyes to pick talent - ie from video or watching kids play at recruiting camps (more on the video and camps in our first episode)

As we will see in a minute, only about three things my son did in recruiting really mattered -- see the first episode for more detail on what we did

He proactively contacted coaches to tell them he was interested

He sent coaches a 5-10 minute video of himself pitching and hitting. We made it from game film but I think most of the videos are just taken in a cage (you can see a bunch of these on YouTube, or email me and I will give you a link to ours)

He went to several camps, which fell into two categories: School camps, at schools he was really interested in; and multi-school camps run by third parties. Of the latter, I am convinced the Headfirst Honor Roll camps are the best if you are interested in DIII or DI "smart schools" (e.g. Ivies, Duke, UVA, Stanford).

OK, so we left off with my son at a two-day baseball camp. My son sent out emails afterwards to the coaches that were at the camp and from schools in which he was interested. Basically he said "nice to have met you, still really interested in your school; now that you have seen me, I'd like to know what you think." He had a few good conversations with coaches at the camp, but after that we really did not hear much until after Labor Day. In retrospect, this delay is probably because the coaches have lots of camps and they want to synthesize their prospect list after all the camps before talking in earnest with players.

We really did not know what to expect. Would coaches call, and if they did, what were the next steps? It was only later that we learned what outcome we should be hoping to hear: Basically, each coach is given some spots by the admissions office (the average seems to be 5 for the baseball guys). If your kid can make that list, then two good things happen: a) it means the coach wants the kid on the team. And b) it generally means the kid will get a good shove to help him through the admissions process, not an inconsequential thing at a school like Princeton or Amherst.

Here is what happened next. This was just our experience, but since it was repeated at five or six schools, almost identically, its a good bet this is a fairly standard process at colleges with high admission requirements:

The coach asks my son to send his transcript and SAT scores early to the Admissions office.

The Admissions office vets these, and gives the coach a reading -- for us, that reading was generally "if you put this kid on your short list, coach, he very likely will get in."

The coach then passed this message to my kid, saying there are no guarantees (etc. etc.) but all the kids with this same read from the admissions office who have been on his list have gotten in in the past.

BUT, there is a bit of a catch. The coach will say that he can only put my kid on his list if we will commit to applying early decision. Early decision (ED) means that one applies in November and hears in December (so well earlier than the April 1 regular admit date), but it is a binding commitment to attend if admitted. This means that one can only apply to one school early decision. Coaches aren't dumb. They can't afford to waste the few recruiting spots they have on kids who aren't going to come. So there is a quid pro quo - the coach will commit to the kid and help him through admissions, but the kid has to commit to the program.

But we only learned this later. When coaches started calling, we weren't sure what to expect. A couple called early to say that my son would not be on their list. I have to give kudos to Coach Bradley from Princeton -- he called and told my son he wouldn't make the list. It was not the news we wanted to hear, but he was up front and honest with us so we did not waste our time. He was also the one who really explained all the stuff I wrote above, so we were more knowledgeable when other coaches called.

Soon, however, we were getting floods of interested contacts. Many were from the coaches he had proactively contacted. Some were from schools we never had heard of, and some were from very good schools but in parts of the country that weren't in his college search area (e.g. Kenyon, Grinnell, Carlton in the midwest). Many of these coaches asked for him to come to campus (on our own dime, they were not paying) for a visit, including an overnight stay with someone on the team. Eventually my son scheduled visits at Wesleyan, Bowdoin, Vassar, and Haverford. He chose these in some cases for the school and in some cases because he really liked the coach. All four of these offered him a spot on the short list for admissions if he was willing to go ED.

It was at this point that we hit the highlight of the whole process. Like many parents, I just want to see my kid gain life skills. My son will never be a good sales person. He is really, really hesitant to cold call adults to ask them for something. This process was good for him in that sense, because he began to see the fruits of having proactively cold-called these coaches earlier in the process. But I still had to poke and prod him to do it.

However, with these other visits set up, my son was apparently thinking "these would all be good schools, but they are not in the top tier of my aspirations." He was thinking about skipping ED, and trusting his grades and resume to the regular admissions process so he could still take a shot at his top choices (places like Princeton and Stanford).

He decided that the ideal choice for him would be Amherst - he loved the school, it was top-notch academically, had a great baseball tradition and an engaging coach. That was the school he would be willing to go ED for. He had met the Amherst coach on a school visit and at camp and Coach Hamm had been very nice. But in the Fall,we had not heard anything from him. (I have to insert a story here -- way back in March my son was on the Amherst campus and dropped by without an appointment at Coach Hamm's office. At that point, Hamm did not know who my son was -- for all he knew he might have been the strikeout leader in T-ball. But he spent a whole hour with Nic showing him around the facility and later at practice.)

This is where the breakthrough came. Without my prodding or even involvement, my son contacted Coach Hamm one more time, to say he had not heard from Amherst but he was still really interested and he would be touring other nearby colleges in a week or so and would still love to meet with him.

We will never know exactly what happened. Perhaps the coach was late in kicking off his recruiting. Perhaps another kid on his list dropped out. Perhaps he just wanted to sit back and see which kids were the hungriest. Whatever the case, Coach Hamm wrote back immediately and said he would love to meet my son on campus (he actually changed around a trip to be there). The process described above played out (grades to the Admissions office, offer to be on the "list", ED application) and long story short, Nic will be at Amherst next year.

As I mentioned earlier, there was no money offered for baseball (nor could there be in leagues like the Ivies or the NESCAC which ban athletic scholarships). Amherst has a great financial aid program, and there are great possibilities for scholarships, grants, and tuition discounts -- but these are offered to all admits, not just to athletes.

I hope this is helpful to some folks who are just starting this process -- I know it would have been a huge help to us to understand in advance.

Postscript: One of the hardest things in the world is to get a good honest reading on your son's talent, particularly if he does not play for a top high school team. People have told my son that he should not have gone DIII, he could be playing DI or he should be in front of pro scouts. You have to take all this stuff with a grain of salt. Sure, you don't want to cut off an opportunity, but on the flip side, sort of like the fox and the cheese, you don't want to lose a good thing chasing the illusion of something better (we know folks this happened to in other sports).

I don't know how to solve this, maybe people have experiences they can put in the comments. For us, being from a small school, several summers playing club ball in a wood bat leagues with the big school kids finally convinced us our son could play at a high level (I say convinced us as parents, our son does not lack confidence so he always knew).

My feed reader today had a series of oddly-related articles stacked right in a row.

First, I watched bits from the 1903 Princeton-Yale football game, the oldest surviving college football film (apparently it is just barely old enough not to have Keith Jackson doing the play-by-play). It is amazing how much more this looked like rugby than modern football. The formations look just like rugby scrums except that the players are not locked together. Note there are no huddles, just power scrum after power scrum. Sort of like a missing link between the two games, and oddly less interesting than either.

I then was met with this post from Zero Hedge, discussing the current Greek bailouts in terms of a Nash Equilibrium, the game-theory concept developed by Princeton grad / professor John Nash (who was famously profiled in A Beautiful Mind).

It's not often I run into John Nash even once in a month, but two articles later I found this really interesting early letter, recently de-classified, from John Nash to the NSA, wherein he apparently anticipated many of the foundation of modern cryptography 10-20 years ahead of his time.

And its only a short walk from John Nash and cryptography to Alan Turing, and from Princeton to tiger stripes, so the next article I ran into was this one discussing a group of scientists who apparently have proved a Turing hypothesis for how tiger stripes (and other recurring patterns in animals) are formed.

I thought this was an interesting hypothesis, that the inability of coporations to use aptitude tests on potential hires (something that has been effectively killed by civil rights suits) has led to the increased reliance on college credentials as a screening mechanism.

I think there is an element of truth to this, but I suspect this would have happened anyway as the presure to cut costs caused companies to push their candidate evaluation and screening onto other institutions. As I wrote a while back

There is some rationality in this approach [to hiring mainly from the Ivies] – it is not all mindless snobbism. Take Princeton. It screens something like 25,000 already exceptional applicants down to just 1500, and then further carefully monitors their performance through intensive contact over a four year period. This is WAY more work and resources than a private firm could ever apply to the hiring process. In effect, by limiting their hiring to just a few top schools, they are outsourcing a lot of their performance evaluation work to those schools.

I don't know if these percentages are entirely correct - I would argue the education / skills component of my mechanical engineering degree was higher than 10%, but that may be just my personal bias - but the basic approach seems sound

Peter Thiel describes higher education as a "giant selection mechanism" and estimates that only 10% of the value of a college degree comes from actual learning, and 50% of the value comes from selection (getting into a selective university) and 40% comes from signalling (graduating from a selective college becomes known to employers). If employers could use intelligence tests instead of college degrees as measures of aptitude, it might be a lot more efficient and more cost-effective than the current practice of using very expensive four-year college degrees that add very little in terms of educational value (at least according to Thiel).

A key reason why a preponderance of the population is fascinated with the student loan market is that as USA Today reported in a landmark piece last year, it is now bigger than ever the credit card market. And as the monthly consumer debt update from the Fed reminds us, the primary source of funding is none other than the US government. To many, this market has become the biggest credit bubble in America. Why do we make a big deal out of this? Because as Bloomberg reported last night, we now have prima facie evidence that the student loan market is not only an epic bubble, but it is also the next subprime! To wit: "Vince Sampson, president, Education Finance Council, said during a panel at the IMN ABS East Conference in Miami Monday that lenders are no longer pushing loans to people who can’t afford them." Re-read the last sentence as many times as necessary for it to sink in. Yes: just like before lenders were "pushing loans to people who can't afford them" which became the reason for the subprime bubble which has since spread to prime, but was missing the actual confirmation from authorities of just this action, this time around we have actual confirmation that student loans are being actually peddled to people who can not afford them. And with the government a primary source of lending, we will be lucky if tears is all this ends in.

When you mess with pricing signals and resource allocation, you get bubbles. And one could easily argue that OWS is as much about the student loan bubble bursting as about Wall Street.

I must say that I never had a ton of sympathy for home buyers who were supposedly "lured" into taking on loans they could not afford. The ultimate cost for most of them was the loss of a home that, if the credit had not been extended, they would never have had anyway. US law protects our other assets from home purchase failures, and while we have to sit in the credit penalty box for a while after mortgage default or bankruptcy, most people are able to recover in a few years.

Student loans are entirely different. In large part because the government is the largest lender via Sallie Mae, student loans cannot be discharged via bankruptcy. You can be 80 years old and still have your social security checks garnished to pay back your student loans. You can more easily discharge credit card debt run up buying lap dances in topless bars than you can student loans. There is absolutely no way to escape a mistake, which is all the more draconian given that most folks who are borrowing are in their early twenties or even their teens.

I can see it now, the pious folks in power trying to foist this bubble off on some nameless loan originators. Well, this is a problem we all caused. The government, as a long-standing policy, has pushed college and student lending. Private lenders have marketed these loans aggressively. Colleges have jacked costs up into the stratosphere, in large part because student loans disconnected consumers from the immediate true costs. And nearly everyone in any leadership position have pushed kids to go to college, irregardless of whether their course of study made even a lick of sense vis a vis their ability to earn back the costs later in the job market.

Public service note: Their are, to my knowledge, five colleges that will provide up to 100% financial aid in the form of grants, such that a student can graduate debt free: Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Amherst. These are obviously really hard schools to get into. I don't think a single one has a double digit percentage admissions rate. But these are the top schools that hopefully establish trends.

I am thrilled my alma mater is on the list. For years I have argued that they were approach severe diminishing returns from spending tens of millions of dollars to improve educational quality another 0.25%. If an institution is really going to live by the liberal arts college philosophy -- that a liberal arts education makes one a better human being irregardless of whether the course of study is easily monetized after graduation -- then it better have a way for students who want to join the Peace Corp or run for the state legislature to graduate without a debt load than only a Wall Street job can pay off.

By the way, my other proposal for Princeton has been this: rather than increasing the educational quality 1% more to the existing students, why not bring Ivy League education to 3x as many students. I have always wondered why a school like Princeton doesn't buy a bunch of cheap land in Arizona and build a western campus for another 10,000 kids.

My son and I spent the last year touring colleges. One common denominator of all the good and great private colleges: they are all over 100 years old. Rice was probably the newest, when a rich guy toured the great colleges of the world and thought he could do as well, and started Rice (Stanford is older but has a sort of similar origin story). Where are the new schools? The number of kids with the qualifications and desire to go to a top private college have skyrocketed, and tuition have risen far more than inflation, but there is no new supply coming on the market. Why is that?

I sit here near Brookhaven on Long Island hiding in my hotel room as I don't want to make my son any more nervous in performing the skill evaluations at the baseball showcase camp he is attending. Two hundred nervous kids and four hundred nervous parents is something I can avoid (though for parental hyperactive competitive frenzy, nothing in my life has yet topped an elementary school chess tournament in Seattle). Later today the format shifts to playing games and I will go over and watch that.

As I sit here, I might as well share with you some of the lessons we have learned in trying to land a spot playing college baseball. I am not sure you should even listen to me, as I knew nothing about this 5 months ago and we still don't know if our son will be successful, though we are gaining confidence.

First, if your kid is a total stud, he may be scouted in high school, either on his school team or on summer and fall teams built for that purpose. If so, great. But just because your kid has never been seen by a college scout, or goes to a school that is not a traditional baseball powerhouse, he is not somehow doomed. Our son certainly has never seen a scout and goes to a school that almost never produces college baseball players. Worse, he plays varsity soccer and basketball so he can't even join a fall scouting team. This probably rules him out for high-powered division 1 programs like ASU or Texas. But there are a ton of schools out there who are likely not going to get even one scouted player.

My son is looking at small liberal arts colleges that tend to play division III (Williams, Amherst, Vassar, Pomona) and a few smart-school division I teams (e.g. Princeton). He has a different equation than the top division 1 athletes. They are hoping their skills will get them a scholarship and acceptance at a school that can offer them exposure to the pros. My son is hoping his skills will put him over the top at a very selective school that is brutally hard to get accepted at, even with good grades. And of course, he just loves to play baseball.

NCAA recruiting is a morass of sometimes non-intuitive rules. And the rules are different for different size schools (e.g. div III vs. div I). But the most important thing I can tell you is that your kid has to take the initiative to get in front of the schools. You cannot rely on your coach or school or anyone else. You can begin earlier, but we started around the middle of his Junior year:

2nd Semester Junior Year

Through much of his junior year, I video'd Nic's games, and then he spliced together a 5 minute highlight video. We put that on YouTube, and sent coaches a letter and a copy of the video.

Most schools have an online prospect form they want you to fill out, and you need to do that. You also need your kid to register with the NCAA clearing house -- it takes a few bucks and they want transcripts and test scores.

During spring break, when we visited schools, in addition to the admissions office tour, we tried also to either schedule a visit with or drop by the baseball coach. Some said hi for 5 minutes, some gave him nearly an hour, but its important to show them you are interested. In all of this, it is very important to have your son take the lead. Yes, I know teenage boys and mine is no different than yours, so you may have to poke and prod in the background, but they need to make the contact. In fact, whenever we meet a coach, I introduce myself, and then I leave my son alone with him.

If you take any message away, I would say this, and I have heard this from many people now: The #1 mistake your kid can make is not being proactive enough in contacting coaches. The #1 mistake you as a parent can make is being too involved with the coach -- they want to see what your kid will be like, at college, out from under your parental umbrella. They do not want to deal with your hopes and fears and anxieties as the overbearing sports parent.

Summer between Junior and Senior year

By NCAA or conference rules, at least atthe div III schools we visited, the coaches cannot give your son a tryout at school. We thought we might obtain something like this when we visited, but it is against the rules. So you need to find a forum to play in front of the coach. The best is if that school has a showcase camp. A lot of schools do -- check their athletics web site. The other great choice are camps held by third parties that have coaches from many schools attending. Nic wrote the coaches at the schools he was interested in and asked them, by email, which camps they were attending so he could get in front of them. If they don't answer, try emailing the assistant coaches (many times the head coach has delegated most of the summer scouting to the assistants).

There are a lot of camps nowadays, because certain groups have found they can be money makers. In fact, I would say baseball camp folks fall into two categories -- there are ones run by baseball guys who really care about the kids and the game, but who can't organize their way out of a paper bag. And there are the commercial ones, that may run well, but tend to have way too many boys for the number of coaches and don't seem to care much about the boys. The exception I found was a group called Headfirst, which runs a series of Honor Roll Camps, so named, I think, because they have coaches from a lot of "smart" schools. These guys really care about the boys and run a fabulous camp. If the schools you are interested attend these camps, I would highly recommend them. Sign up early, they always sell out.

Here is how this camp runs, as an example. In the first morning, the boys will do a number of skills workouts for the coaches (who are all on the field in folding chairs taking notes). Outfielders will field four balls and make a few long throws to the plate. Infielders will do the same from shortstop. Catchers will be timed popping up and making the throw to second. Everyone gets timed in the 60-yard dash. Everyone gets to hit 9 balls in batting practice in front of all the coaches. The rest of the two days the boys are organized into teams and play games, which are as much about pitcher evaluations as anything else. At this camp, all of the games are coached by the college coaches who are there recruiting. The coaches rotate so they see everyone.

These are weird events. I have a ton of respect for all the kids. Imagine hitting in a batting cage with one hundred coaches in folding chairs writing in notebooks all around the sides of the cage. Or pitching when there is a net right behind the catcher, and right behind that are 50 guys taking notes, ten of whom are holding radar guns.

The kids get nervous, but one thing we have learned is that coaches are looking at something different than laymen might expect. What the kids may consider to be a screw-up may actually be a success. You and I are impressed by the guy who lines a couple into the gap, vs. the guy who grounds out to the pitcher. But the coaches are not even looking where the ball goes -- they are locked on the batter and his swing. That is why they do the hitting showcase in the cage now instead of on the field like they used to -- the coaches just want to see the kid's form. Ditto the other stuff. In the last camp, my son put himself down as an outfielder rather than pitcher (though he plays both in high school) because he felt like his hitting was his best path to college. But in one of the early drills they put a radar gun on him, saw he threw 88mph, and asked him to pitch. And then the second day the head coach wanted to see him pitch again.

By the way, before each camp, My son looked at the list of coaches attending the camp and sent them emails, and called a favored few, to tell them that he would be at the camp, that he is really interested in their school, and could they please look out for him. At the camp, the kids really need to take the lead in walking up to coaches (who are all wearing their school's gear) and introducing themselves. No, your kid is not different from mine -- it is hard to get them to do this. To their credit, the Headfirst camps actually work with the kids to encourage them in this. The camp leaders are constantly walking up to kids and saying "have you introduced yourself to a coach yet?"

The Fall of Senior Year

The rules vary by sport, but apparently the kids cannot be called at their home by baseball coaches until July 1 (again, this is in div III, rules may vary by sport). This reinforces the need for kids to be proactive. Most coaches will wait until the summer camps are over and develop their short list of kids to call and recruit. That is all Div III schools can do. Div I schools can bring a few kids in for a university-paid campus visit. If you get one of those (they only have a few to give out) that is the best sign of all that the coach is truly interested and not just blowing smoke to be nice.

We expect this to be our fall challenge -- how do you figure out if the school is really interested? In the common application era, it is absolutely critical to tell a college you are really interested and not just hitting the send button to the 29th school. The best way to do this is by applying early admission, but you only get one of these. We are hoping to match the school we pick for early admit with Nic's interests as well as baseball coaches' interest. We'll see how it goes.

Mind of the Coach

The following could be completely wrong. It is put together not by someone who has experience with baseball or who has been a coach and player, but as someone acting as sort of a baseball anthropologist trying to figure out what is going on. The following applies mainly to smaller schools not in the top 20 or 30 national programs -- they have a completely different situation.

The camps seem intimidating, because there are so many good kids playing. Coaches seem like these Olympian figures deciding everyone's fate based on inscrutable criteria. But never forget this -- coaches are just as desperate as you are. As much as your son is desperately trying to land a spot, coaches are desperately trying to get good players. Remember, someone probably needs your son. And smaller school coaches have to sit back and wait for ASU and Texas to skim the cream before they can even get started with the task.

They have to make decisions on very little data, or what you and I would consider little data. Over and over again I hear that unless you are in a school or league with which they are familiar, your kid's ERA or batting average and stats means almost nothing to them. They will make most of their evaluation from looking at him for what seems a really brief time. If your son is being encouraged to rework his swing, but he is worried that his stats will drop for a while as he makes the changes, remember that his form, not his stats, will likely get him a spot at a school

Most schools allow the baseball coach to send a list of kids -3,5, maybe 7 names - to the admission office for special consideration. Most of these kids will get in. Being on that list at a school like Princeton or Amherst that have 8% admit rates is therefore a huge boost. But, having a limited number of spots, the coach is not going to put a kid's name on that list unless he is pretty sure that kid is going to come. Getting five studs through admissions is useless if they all are headed to Duke or Stanford instead. My son has picked a few schools and has really worked to make sure the coach understands he is likely to accept an admission.

This is just a guess based on how organizations work, but my sense is that coaches have a certain "budget" as to how much they can ask the admissions office to bend their standards for their recruits. This means that for selective schools, it still helps a LOT for your kid to have good academics and test scores. The Headfirst camp we are at now actually asks for grades and scores in advance, and puts those on the cheat sheet every coach gets. I can guarantee you that before a guy from Harvard falls in love with your kid's swing, he looks down at those academics to see if he can afford to.

Most medium and small school coaches have no idea on June 1 who they will be recruiting for the next class. So if it is June 1 and your son is a rising senior, it is not at all too late.

A while back I wrote this as part of a response saying that the only way to get into a top consultancy was to got to Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Stanford. Having joined a top consulting firm from Princeton and Harvard, I thought some of their observations to be BS, but there is a certain core of truth. As I wrote then:

There is some rationality in this approach – it is not all mindless snobbism. Take Princeton. It screens something like 25,000 already exceptional applicants down to just 1500, and then further carefully monitors their performance through intensive contact over a four year period. This is WAY more work and resources than a private firm could ever apply to the hiring process. In effect, by limiting their hiring to just a few top schools, they are outsourcing a lot of their performance evaluation work to those schools.

Those of us who question the price and value of higher education don’t disagree that people with B.A.s do much better in life, especially in employment. We disagree about the source of that advantage: The B.A. may mostlycorrelate with and signal for, rather than impart important qualities. (Really we all agree it’s some mix of the three factors — our differences are of emphasis.)...

We skeptics think this: Since employers can no longer measure job applicants’ IQs nor put them through long apprenticeships, graduating college is the way job-searchers signal an intelligence and diligence that college itself may have contributed little toward. Employers are (to use a little economic jargon) partially outsourcing their employee search to colleges. This is a good deal for employers, because college costs them nothing, and the social pressure to get a BA means they won’t miss too many good prospective recruits by limiting their search to college grads.

I think this has a lot of truth to it, but it can't entirely be true -- if it were, your degree would not matter but we know engineering and economics majors get hired more than poetry majors. Though one could still stick with the strong skeptical position by arguing that degree choice is again merely a signal as to interests and outlook and a potentially even a proxy for other characteristics (to the latter point, what is your mental picture of an engineering major? a women's studies major? a politics major? an econ major?)

On a college visit trip in New England with my son. We will be at Cornell, Amherst, Williams, Dartmouth, Bowdoin, Colby, Bates, Brown, Yale, Princeton. If your best friend is admissions director or the baseball coach at any of these schools and is desperately searching for smart kids from Arizona who blog and hit for power, you are welcome to email me :=)

I took my blog post from earlier this week and expanded it to a full-blown column on the NCAA and its efforts to never, ever let its athletes make a dime from their skills. An excerpt:

University presidents with lucrative athletic programs will do about anything to distract attention from just how much money their Universities are making off of essentially unpaid labor. Their favorite mantra is to claim they are holding up an ideal of “amateurism.”

The whole amateur ideal is just a tired holdover from the British aristocracy, the blue-blooded notion that a true “gentleman” did not actually work for a living but sponged off the local gentry while perfecting his golf or polo game. These ideas permeated British universities like Oxford and Cambridge, which in turn served as the model for many US colleges. Even the Olympics, though, finally gave up the stupid distinction of amateur status years ago, allowing the best athletes to compete whether or not someone has ever paid them for anything.

In fact, were we to try to impose this same notion of “amateurism” in any other part of society, or even any other corner of University life, it would be considered absurd. Do we make an amateur distinction with engineers? Economists? Poets?

When Brooke Shields was at Princeton, she still was able to perform in the “amateur” school shows despite the fact she had already been paid as an actress. Engineering students are still allowed to study engineering at a University even if a private party pays them for their labor over the summer. Students don’t get kicked out of the school glee club just because they make money at night singing in a bar. The student council president isn’t going to be suspended by her school if she makes money over the summer at a policy think tank.

In fact, of all the activities on campus, the only one a student cannot pursue while simultaneously getting paid is athletics. I am sure that it is just coincidence that athletics happens to be, by orders of magnitude, far more lucrative to universities than all the other student activities combined.

Princeton continues its designated role in the universe of scaring the crap out of high NCAA tournament seeds, but fell just short when Kentucky took the lead with 2 seconds left. I engaged in emotional diversification by picking against them in my brackets, so I would have both joy and pain either way.

If you want to get a job at the very best law firm, investment bank, or consultancy, here’s what you do:

1. Go to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or (maybe) Stanford. If you’re a business student, attending the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania will work, too, but don’t show up with a diploma from Dartmouth or MIT. No one cares about those places. ... That’s the upshot of an enlightening/depressing study about the ridiculously narrow-minded people who make hiring decisions at the aforementioned elite companies. ... These firms pour resources into recruiting students from “target schools” (i.e., Harvard, Yale, Princeton) and then more or less ignore everybody else. Here’s a manager from a top investment bank describing what happens to the resume of someone who went to, say, Rutgers: “I’m just being really honest, it pretty much goes into a black hole.”

Being, I suppose, an insider to this process (Princeton - Harvard Business School - McKinsey & Company) I'd like to make a few comments

First and foremost, this problem cuts both ways. I can imagine outsiders are frustrated with the lack of access. But as an insider I can tell you (cue Admiral Akbar) It's a Trap! You go to Princeton, think, wow, I did well at Princeton, it would be a waste not to do something with that. You are a competitive sole, so getting into a top grad school is an honor to be pursued just like good grades. So you go to Harvard Business School (it could have been Harvard Law) and do well. And what is the mark of achievement there? -- getting a job at a top consultancy or top investment bank. So you take the McKinsey job, have your first kid, and what do you find out? Wow, I hate this job! In fact, the only thing I would have hated more is if I had taken that Wall Street job. Eventually you find happiness running your own company, only to discover your Ivy League degrees are a liability since they intimidate your employees from sharing their ideas and most of the other guys you know successfully running businesses went to Kansas State or Rutgers.

My only data point inside this hiring process is from McKinsey about 15-20 years ago, so it may be out of date. But at that time, the above statement would be BS. Certainly hiring was heavily tilted to the top Ivies and a few top business schools. But we had people with undergrad degrees from all over - in fact most of our office in Texas had undergrad degrees from the Texas state schools (at lot from BYU too -- McKinsey loved the Mormons). At the time, McKinsey was hiring hundreds of people out of business school around the world each year. No way this could have come from only a few schools.

My hypothesis is that this may be more a regional than an industry bias, limited to Boston/New York/East Coast. Since many top law firms and consultancies and investment banks are in NYC, they reflect this local bias. But I would bet these same firms and industries hire differently outside of the East Coast.

There is some rationality in this approach - it is not all mindless snobbism. Take Princeton. It screens something like 25,000 already exceptional applicants down to just 1500, and then further carefully monitors their performance through intensive contact over a four year period. This is WAY more work and resources than a private firm could ever apply to the hiring process. In effect, by limiting their hiring to just a few top schools, they are outsourcing a lot of their performance evaluation work to those schools.